7 dwarves you might not know. Slowpoke? Ticklish? Quee?

In the Brothers Grimm version of “Snow White,” based on a Bavarian folktale, you’ll find all the familiar characters, including the seven dwarves.

But the dwarves don’t have individual names in the Grimm story. They’re still sweet and supportive. They’re still grateful for the cooking and cleaning Snow White does around the cottage. But they’re more or less interchangeable dwarves.

The gang got their first set of names in the early 1900s. The Broadway play, ”Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” (1912), christened them:

Blick, Glick, Flick, Plick, Snick, Whick and Quee.

The 1937 animated Disney classic invented the names most of us know:

Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy and Dopey.

And just last weekend, at the Pearl Theatre in Pearland, I witnessed another incarnation of the famous dwarves, in a theatrical adaptation of “Snow White” by Tim Kelly. (Catch the final shows this coming Saturday, Nov. 17). In this version, the dwarves are:

11 Responses

Good morning Maggie. This is a nice article and it points out a very interesting phenomenon. If you are a baby boomer,the versions and details of all the fairy tales, old stories, western lore and even the Battle of The Alamo were created and firmly etched in your mind as presented by Walt Disney.
Today’s children will be exposed to various other creators, but for most of us, Disney’s creations are the norm. Thanks

In Craig Shaw Gardner‘s The Wanderings of Wuntvor series, which is a pastiche/send-up of traditional bildungsroman and heroic fantasy, the protagonist runs into the Seven Other Dwarves. Among that crew are Surly, Nasty, Spacey, Smarmy, Sickly, and Clumsy.

Once they hit the “big kid” phase (early grade school) most kids will refuse to watch G-rated movies becasue they are for “little kids.” The studios, according to parent friends, will insert a body-function joke or two into a perfectly good G-rated movie to push it into the PG rating loved by 4-th graders. Are you sure none of Walt’s vertically challenged minions were named Gassey?

But sack o’ cats is right… the original Grimm’s is some pretty terrifying stuff by today’s standards.

While working as a bartender I would promise a free drink to anyone who could name the dwarves. No one ever collected, but some of the names include Ziggy, Popeye and a crossbreed between Sleepy and Sneezy named Sleezy.